Letter collection goes under the hammer

The World Today - Tuesday, 5 June , 2007 12:45:00

Reporter: Karen Barlow

ELEANOR HALL: To the extraordinary collection of letters found in a Swiss laundry.

For three decades, a secretive collector amassed letters from some of the most notable figures of the last five centuries. Many are so famous they can be recognised by just one name - Napoleon, Einstein, Beethoven, Hemingway.

And when it goes to auction next month, Albin Schram's collection is expected to fetch more than $5-million, as Karen Barlow reports.

KAREN BARLOW: In 1795, well before the age of email and text messaging, this is how a famous couple made up after an argument.

EXCERPT FROM NAPOLEON BONAPARTE LETTER: I send you three kisses - one on your heart, one on your mouth and one on your eyes.

KAREN BARLOW: The love letter from Napoleon Bonaparte to his soon-to-be wife, Josephine, started the collecting bug for the former World War II soldier, Albin Schram.

Quietly, Mr Schram spent more than 30 years touring European auction houses. And by the time he died two years ago, he had almost 1,000 letters secreted away in a basement filing cabinet.

Some of the handwritten notes are by Oliver Cromwell, Oscar Wilde, Queen Elizabeth I and the poet and priest John Donne.

The Senior Curator at the Mitchell Library in Sydney, Paul Brunton, says it's an important collection not just for the names, but for what the authors say.

PAUL BRUNTON: For example, the letter by John Donne, which is a letter of condolence which he sends to Lady Kingsmill on the death of her husband, has the marvellous line that although we shouldn't judge God's actions, we could direct Him to do them better.

KAREN BARLOW: Sir Isaac Newton discusses his theory of gravity in his letter. Mahatma Gandhi makes a plea for tolerance in his, and author Ernest Hemingway uses his correspondence to compare literary critics to bulls.

Albin Schram's collection has been broken up into 570 lots, and will go under the hammer at Christies in London next month.

Paul Brunton believes it will collectively sell for much more than the expected $5-million.

PAUL BRUNTON: Well I think there's a great emotional attachment to letters by great people. It's the paper and the ink and there's, you can relate to them. You think wow, that man Calvin, or Napoleon, he actually had this piece of paper in his hand and he wrote on it with ink. So, it's very understandable how collectors really get sucked in by all this and become quite passionate about it.

KAREN BARLOW: What about the handwriting, in that it says something about the personality or how they were feeling at the time?

PAUL BRUNTON: Yes it does, and I think that you can often tell from someone's handwriting, their character. I mean I think, although he's not represented in this collection, I think of William Bligh and the mutiny. Bligh had such clear and precise handwriting, which never varied whether he was writing a love letter or whether he was in the middle of a mutiny, it was still the same precise, clear handwriting. And that was because Bligh never had any doubts. He always thought he was right and he was beyond reproach. And so you can see that in the handwriting.

And similarly in Napoleon's letters to Josephine in this collection, the changes and the crossings out reveals the passionate way he's writing to his beloved.

KAREN BARLOW: Very little is known about the late collector, which Paul Brunton says is the unassuming way most manuscript collectors operate.

Albin Schram's letters are likely to be sold to libraries, museums and other private collectors who also get a thrill from holding paper history in their hands.

PAUL BRUNTON: Being able to sit in your armchair at home and, and read a letter by John Calvin or something, there's one by Tchaikovsky, for example, Dostoyevsky. To actually hold in your hand letters which these great people have held in their hands, and it's a very private pleasure and a very, I think, rewarding pleasure, for collectors.